5 Websites That Make Language Learning More Interactive

Great teachers strive to make learning engaging, interactive, and fun for students. Certain subjects like the visual arts and hands-on sciences may lend themselves well to this. Language learning, on the other hand, has rarely been grouped with “the cool subjects.”

As technology advances, more and more tools have become available that when used correctly can make language learning anything but boring.

As a teacher, you’ve already established a curriculum and methods for teaching your language, so instead of re-writing all of your work, pull from the myriad supplemental opportunities that can be found online to make lessons more engaging and therefore memorable.

Here are five great websites that supplement your lessons, making language learning more interactive and fun.

Sure, YouTube is great for watching videos of kittens being adorable, but have you ever explored YouTube for fun language tools? There are a number of ways to use YouTube as a supplement to your language courses. For example:

Play the top-rated music videos in the language you teach; have students sing along or translate the lyrics.

Find scenes from popular television commercials and discuss how their language and culture might make them different from commercials in the U.S.

Find the foreign version of an American movie and have students discuss what changed because of the language differences.

Check out popular language teacher Fluency MC and integrate his work in your class.

Here’s another familiar website. If you’ve ever gone on vacation or a day trip, you may have used TripAdvisor to research and plan in advance. In the classroom, you can use TripAdvisor’s multi-lingual options to have your students do the exact same thing—with a twist.

Point your students toward a country where the language they’re learning is spoken, and have them plan out their “dream vacation” in that country. Ask them to read reviews of hotels, restaurants, and attractions—all of which are written in their language of study.

Encourage them to put together an itinerary for their trip, and explain why they chose to visit certain spots.

This is an awesome website that gives your students the “big picture” of languages around the world, including the one they’re learning. The interactive tool allows users to explore interesting statistics about ten different languages.

After a student chooses a language, they can click around an interactive map to explore where in the world that language is spoken while reading fun stats about the language, such as the average length of time and monetary cost to learn that language. This free website would make a great introduction to students’ first year of a foreign language program.

Built and hosted by Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, The Mixxer is a free platform for bringing speakers of different languages together for conversational practice. Individuals can buddy up with a “language partner” who is trying to learn English, and help each other learn their respective language.

There’s even a special tool for teachers to connect their students with native speakers of the language they’re learning. There’s room to practice both speaking and writing, as The Mixxer facilitates both written correspondence and conversations via Skype.

Gamification is growing both in and out of the classroom and for good reason: interactive language games are great tools to get students engaged. The Digital Dialects offers a wide variety of games—all for free—in a whopping 77 languages, from Afrikaans to Zazaki.

Students can choose games based on the assignment: phrases, vocabulary, conjugation, and more. With the wide variety of options available, this website is a versatile tool that will get students excited about language learning.

Jessica Thiefels

Jessica is an education blogger and has been featured in publications such as EdTech Digest and Daily Genius. Her favorite books growing up were My Side of the Mountain and The Giver, and she hopes to inspire a similar love of reading in students and educators.

About The Author

jessicathiefels

Jessica is an education blogger and has been featured in publications such as EdTech Digest and Daily Genius. Her favorite books growing up were My Side of the Mountain and The Giver, and she hopes to inspire a similar love of reading in students and educators.

With Buncee, students are able to creatively integrate various forms of multimedia (ie. files, graphics, videos, text, audio) together to build out a digital creation/presentation to facilitate their language learning. For students, what gives Buncee its special touch is that its drag and drop interface makes it easy enough for kids as early as 1st grade to use, but its features are robust enough for adult-use. The idea behind the tool is to make learning as fun, engaging, and interactive as it can 🙂 Plus, its available as an iOS app in the App Store, so students and teachers can continue learning at home or on-the-go on their iPhone or iPad

Here’s an example I thought I’d share for other language learners as it is free to use: http://bunc.ee/1SBstoa

There are so many other websites and tools which can make teaching and learning easy. I was using a chat room where you could learn foreign languages by chatting with others. Different countries people used to learn and teach each other through chatting. Visuals are the best way which helps someone to understand anything easily.

Zaption: it brings more interactivity to YouTube videos because it allows the teacher to pose questions, add text/drawings and get data in student responses, how long they watched, how many times they paused/replayed etc.

Memrise: though it shelters vocabulary, it tracks student errors and forces them to focus on words with which they struggle. The leaderboard feature motivates more competitive students.

Señor Wooly’s vids/curriculum, though only for Spanish classes, is pretty thorough, and focuses on comprehensible input, and recycling chunks of language rather than isolating grammar/vocabulary.

Mystery Skype/Google Hangouts are great for connecting with classes in the target culture.

Voxer/Google voice are tools that can be used to have students respond to teacher prompts or peer questions/statements.

Two of the tools essentially involve no target language use whatsoever. ACTFL recommends 90%+ target language use from day 1. A non- language-teacher wouldn’t know that, and a newer teacher reading this blog might not either. That is concerning. I did not mean to offend, but I would never write a blog about math pedagogy either. Apologies for the harshness, but I’m passionate about what I do.

With all due respect, I have some serious issues with your post. As a language teacher, I find your opening paragraph:

“Great teachers strive to make learning engaging, interactive, and fun for students. Certain subjects like the visual arts and hands-on sciences may lend themselves well to this. Language learning, on the other hand, has rarely been grouped with “the cool subjects.” ”

to be quite offensive. I guess “cool” is in the eye of the beholder. Further, although I don’t fault you for having no understanding of language pedagogy (since you are not a language teacher), I find it a bit disingenuous that you would write a blog post touting ways to make a language classroom more “interactive”, when several of the sites you recommend and the techniques you suggest (with the exception of Mixxer) actually impede the kind of interactivity that leads to effective language learning — students interacting IN THE TARGET LANGUAGE. Your focus on what is “fun” and “popular” might get students engaged, but is only worthwhile if it is effective. Also, the Digital Dialects website has little or nothing to do with gamification, which is very different than game-based learning, which the games on the Digital Dialects site could be a part of, but would be far down my list of recommendations. There are numerous language educators who have been using technology very effectively for many years, and would be fantastic resources for pedagogically sound suggestions.

Hey Tracy, I don’t understand why the “. . . cool subjects” sentence is offensive. I did teach language learners for over two decades, and in most cases ESL classes don’t seem “cool” to ELLs. Also, the post is about exposing people to sites that help with interactivity. If one is far down on your list, that’s fine. Why not suggest some of your own, as Jessica requests at the end of the post. Sharing your own suggestions and experiences would be more productive than bashing a writer who is attempting to share resources. Also, suggesting that the tools in the post impede interactivity that leads to learning is misleading and inaccurate. A good teacher can use any of these tools to inspire interactive learning. Again, if you want to denigrate the post, that’s fine. After all, this is Brilliant or Insane. However, you should at least counter with something productive.Mark Barnes recently posted…12 Productivity Tools for Tech-Savvy Teachers

Tracy, thanks for your feedback. This list is not meant to be exhaustive—just a small selection for teachers who may be looking to something new for the classroom. I’m glad you know what works for you and your students, and I’m sure many others will see this list and be excited to give these new tools and websites a try. I would love to hear what tools you like to use as well, so teachers reading this can see what other options are out there. Thanks again, Tracy – we appreciate everyone’s opinions!Jessica Thiefels recently posted…5 Websites That Make Language Learning More Interactive